Larry Rosenwald on Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”

I’ve mentioned before how I was inspired to embark on my experiment in
tax resistance by reading Henry David Thoreau’s
1849 essay
Resistance to Civil
Government (more popularly known as Civil
Disobedience).

Today I came across an study written a few years ago about Thoreau’s
essay — The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by
Lawrence Rosenwald. It is a very good look at the historical and biographical
context of Thoreau’s essay, and of how Thoreau’s understanding of resistance
compares to other theories that were current at that time, and with the
understandings of people like Gandhi who were inspired by Thoreau later on.

Rosenwald is himself a war tax resister. He withholds the portion of his
federal income taxes that he believes goes to support war, and then the
government seizes a similar amount from him after some intervening
bureaucracy. Like me, Rosenwald was eventually won over to tax resistance by
Thoreau’s persuasiveness. He tells the story this way:

Now he does teach Civil Disobedience — and
if his
study is any indication, it must be one hell of a class. I’ve read
Thoreau’s essay many times, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been viewing it
through a keyhole because of my chronological distance from Thoreau and his
time. Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of who Thoreau was
addressing his essay to and what arguments he was responding to and amplifying.

Rosenwald writes elsewhere about how things have changed since Thoreau’s time
and how the tax resister today has a different set of concerns, and confronts
a different sort of tax collecting apparatus. Thoreau wrote:

But the state now confronts the tax resister more with laws and faceless
bureaucracies and electronic seizures of bank accounts — this meeting of peers
on equal ground is a thing of the past. Rosenwald finds little satisfaction
in confronting the dumb behemoth that has replaced Thoreau’s tax-gatherer:

[T]he IRS
has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have been collected on
three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by levies on our bank
accounts; each time the levy took not only the original refused tax but also
penalties and interest. Even now the
IRS
occasionally fumbles; before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank
account I had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank
levy and the second it refunded the levied money with interest. But this
clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more
predictable bureaucracy might have done…

Rosenwald also notes that Thoreau chose tax resistance reluctantly and in an
attempt to avoid getting involved with politics. He eventually
concluded that where taxes were concerned, a political choice could not be
avoided (in Rosenwald’s words, “in paying taxes abstinence just isn’t a
choice, because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse
to pay them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics”).

Today’s Thoreau-ish tax resister is confronted by many more of these
entanglements than Thoreau was. Thoreau could imagine that “I meet this
American government, or its representative, the State government, directly,
and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer;
this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.”
Today you meet the tax-gatherer and other coercive agents of the state on a
daily basis. Getting from the unexamined life to a place where you can plant
your feet and “[l]et your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” is
arguably much more difficult today.

You might also be interested in another article of Rosenwald’s:
Orwell, Pacifism, Pacifists. It’s about George Orwell’s
evolving and nuanced criticisms of pacifism, and it’s a good read.

The IRS
is puffing up its institutional chest and engaging in the annual ritual of
declaring that it’s going to get tough on tax cheatersthis year. Over the last few years, there’s been
a 50% increase in the number of people surveyed by the
IRS
Oversight Board who say that cheating on your taxes isn’t wrong.

The IRS
hopes that by sounding tough, it’ll discourage tax cheats. People who play it
straight on their tax forms are increasingly reporting that it’s not the value
of honesty that motivates them, but the fear of audits. According to the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, however:

IRS-prompted tax prosecutions, non-tax-related prosecutions also investiagted by the
IRS,
administrative penalties assessed by the
IRS out
of court, and civil suits filed by the
IRS — all of these are down dramatically over the past
decade. A year ago, the
IRS
commissioner reported “a huge gap between the number of taxpayers whom the
IRS
knows are not filing, not reporting or not paying what they owe and our
capacity to require them to comply.”

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